Finding and getting right people to work for your company isn’t as
easy as you think even you find many awesome things in resumes. To
SharePoint field, the difficulty of recruitment becomes more true
because of complexity of SharePoint platform and different uses of it.
Have you ever been responsible for interviewing SharePoint professional
working for your company? Which questions would you like to ask your
candidates?

Recently, I’ve been assigned to be part of recruiting team in my
company, responsible for online interviewing some candidates whose
good-looking resumes on my table. I, although, did quick search on
Google using keyword “SharePoint Job interview questions” but I never used any of them to ask the candidates. I didn’t ask something like “What is the X method?” or “Is there any difference between X and Y?” or “How does execution of X code impact on Y environment?”
because I did know someone could readily put his fingers on the Google
search box and then quickly found good results. So what did I ask when
doing an online interview? In this post, I would like to share only 4
pragmatic questions I asked for SharePoint Solution Director candidates.

Can you tell me about two most favorite projects you have worked on?

A brilliant candidate should get started with brief introduction, his
role and responsibilities, project size and duration. Through his
answer, you probably know he has hands-on experience, especially his
passion on those projects. Candidates can’t find the answer to my
question on Google or another search engine.

Let’s see a sample answer: “One of the most favorite projects done
was to build a logistic management application built on top of
SharePoint platform. I worked as Lead Architect, responsible for
planning and designing architecture covering infrastructure, capacity,
storage, security and development. We had 6 team members working within 4
months to complete the project.”
After getting such a clear answer, you can possibly have a few extra questions such as:

Can you concisely describe features of the logistic management you
completed developing? Using this question, you can figure out how
complex this project is.

How many roles in this project? Which was the most important role
you think? I know this question should be focused for SharePoint project
manager but if he actually has good mindset, he should probably get to
overall picture of the project.

Can you describe a little bit of the environment? You may get an
overview of SharePoint farm maybe with a staging farm. It looks really
cool, isn’t it?

Which challenges/issues did you get in the two projects?

A real experienced SharePoint professional has to note challenges and
issues or at least remember during his project. The reason I ask is to
know how he solves problem if occurred, and more details in solution
architecture and probably soft-skill he has. Sometimes you expect to see
soft-skill a candidate has rather than technical skill used to solve
complexity of SharePoint project. That said, when asking an Indian
candidate, I was expecting to get more of X management challenge such as
risk management, change management or so on. However, he mostly focused
on answering code stuffs, e.g, “They didn’t have the latest code available for the custom code solutions deployed in SharePoint 2007”, or “We had to update the existing code and then build it on x64 platform before upgrading to SharePoint 2010.” At this point, you can see this guy can fit developer role rather.
I know code related issue is one of the most common challenges in
SharePoint project but I need to know if there is something else that
keeps me asking in more details because of my curiousness.

Let’s see a sample answer: “Although we used Microsoft Solution
Framework to manage SharePoint project, we still had problem with
customer requirement that were changes of functionality. We had to deal
with that, and built a SharePoint site collection used to track changes
and manage the problem. Another issue was that we didn’t have a Team
Foundation Server professional so our collaboration process got some
times delayed.“

The Indian guy I interviewed worked with a customer that had SAP
system and they wanted to pull data from it to push to SharePoint. He
had to write a custom web service. I know he is really good at
customization but what I was expecting to see from his answer should be
like: “The customer had SAP system and they wanted to pull data from it
and then push to SharePoint. We knew that Duet enterprise was an epic
but the customer didn’t have enough budget so we had to customize web
service to meet the business requirement and fit the budget.” Duet
Enterprise was my focused point that would denote his breadth knowledge.

What are different/same things between any two projects you have done?

I don’t need candidates to elaborate differences, or list all
different/same things. What I expect is to see if candidates have good
brain to remember what they have done, and how they response in
systematic way, and their brain be organized logically.

Let’s see a sample answer: “We had two SharePoint document
management projects (A and B) but A had document processing workflow but
B didn’t. Conversely, B required digital signature issued by a PKI (Public-key Infrastructure) but A didn’t. One of the same things were the functionality of search based managed metadata.”

What do you think about the concept of SharePoint Out-of-the-box (OOTB)?

When having a blueprint in your hand, take a glance at SharePoint
OOTB to see if it can meet business needs without code, or write a
little code putting in Content Query web part to trigger something, for
example. At this point, you can supposedly bring out a scenario, e.g., ABC
is the marketing company that helps customer in promotion of products
and services by organizing conference. Each conference has its own a set
of documents that likely consists of marketing plan, budget plan,
program plan and other documents related to the conference. ABC is using
SharePoint and wonder if it can help manage such a set effectively. As
an experienced SharePoint professional, what would you like to suggest
them? I’m guessing many of you immediately propose Document Set
feature that actually addresses to the concern. Ironically, you might
forget asking which SharePoint version the marketing company is using,
right?

Conclusion

In my opinion, these questions do qualify someone who indeed has much
experience on SharePoint platform and he has done many real-world
SharePoint projects whether those are big or not. These questions are
connected logically so if you don’t really have much SharePoint
experience, you could get stuck at any of the questions. Besides,
candidates can’t find good answers from Google or even they refer to
friends of theirs.
When you do an online interview, try to avoid your candidates doing
search by asking intelligent questions. You shouldn’t ask kind of
“How-To” question or technique focused. Having good technical skills is
really good these days but it’s not enough for working in the harsh
world.

17 April, 2013

After talking with a job seeker the other day, I asked for his card so I could keep in touch with him. He replied that his company didn't give its employees business cards. He didn't have a personal business card either.

I was asking for his card because I had spoken with him a couple of months before, and he took my card and said he would contact me so I could pass job leads to him. But I didn't hear from him, and I had no way to initiate contact with him, so he missed a couple of good leads.

I realized that not everyone has been taught the value of a business card - their own personal business card - to their career.

Problem:
A user tries to open an InfoPath form in the application instead of the browser, and get an error message:

The user can open in the browser just fine, and has been able to open the forms previously with no problem. User is able to download the form to their desktop and open the form in InfoPath. But when they try to open the form in the application from the context menu, the above error is shown.

In researching the error, I found a support posting that provided a clue to the problem. In it, the user is instructed to enable Add Ons in their Internet Explorer:

Go to Tools in IE, click Internet Options

Click Programs at the top

Click “Manage add-ons” near the bottom

Click Publisher, then you can see all of Microsoft Corporation together

Scroll to SharePoint names (May be one or several)

Make sure they are all enabled by clicking on the name; the Enable button is towards the bottom.

Your user
will be raising a ticket for to create a replica of the production site in
development environment.

Quite easy
- correct? You can easily implement this by using PowerShell but now the
problem starts from here. If your site collection admin has created a term
store in production site then you will not get those in development environment.
Hmm- seems to be difficult now, isn’t it?

Reason: Managed metadata terms and term sets each have a unique
guid and the guids don't match up

Nothing to
worry about as we have a solution for that :)

Let me
brief some details as local terms can be created by 2 ways:

-centrally i.e. @Central Administration Level

-Locally i.e. @site collection level

Let me talk
about ‘Centrally’ first: There are some ways by which you can implement this.

Error#5:
specified argument was out of the range of valid values. Parameter name:content
type not found(‘0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF39004C1F8B46085B4D22B1CDC3DE08CFFB9C’).

Analysis:

Wiki
template is a dependency section of Publishing Infrastructure as per the
following articles:

We will be hosting lunch at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta on April 30 to take a deep dive into the things you really want to know about using Nintex to enhance your SharePoint deployment. You'll hear from our top consultants and a key customer or two. One attendee will go home with a free Windows Surface!

With the launch of SharePoint 2013 came some exciting new features and improvements in the realm of Web Content Management (WCM). Content authoring improvements like Image Renditions and the ability to drag and drop navigation items directly onto a page create a better experience for content authors, while branding advancements like the new Design Manager and Device Channels further empower web designers. Throw in Managed Navigation, Cross-site Publishing, Catalog-enabled lists and libraries, Category pages, clean URLs and the ability to capture a video thumbnail straight from the video and it is clear that WCM has received quite the facelift courtesy of SharePoint 2013.

Today’s modern company is comprised of multiple offices, telecommuters, business travelers and clients on various continents in different time zones. In this global economy, business applications are required to meet the needs of each employee and customer whether they are in Atlanta or Hong Kong. No one wants to be sitting in an important meeting not being able to access and interact with the data and processes they need. For this month’s Tip of the Month, we’re examining the benefits of utilizing the powerful cloud features of Nintex Live with Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms.

One of the best improvements in SharePoint from version to version has been with Search. Search Server Express was added for SharePoint WSS 2007. Fast Search was introduced in SharePoint Server 2010 among other great feature improvements around the search service. In SharePoint Server 2013, Fast Search technology is now included in the standard search service and a new feature known as continuous search has been added. SharePoint's Search service is far superior to list views to locating documents and item information in SharePoint. There are so many features of search that can be easily utilized or extended upon so much so that each deserves its own article. One feature that this article will focus on is searching SharePoint content from your computer using Windows Explorer and how to extend its capabilities.

We have created a new UAT environment for
the deployment purposes and everything is new. Suddenly the requirement comes
up for managed metadata. As this environment is newly built so we have not
created all the service applications and work/create as per the requirement
arises.

Note:

If you find a different solution, please report it as a comment to
this post. Be sure to double-verify it: undo your solution and verify that the
problem comes back, then redo it and verify that the problem goes away.

Problem
Description:

Creation
of new service application named as ‘managed metadata’

I
have created a new service application by providing the following data:

1.Name
of the service application Example. Managedmetedata_DEVSP

2.Name
of the application pool

3.Selecting
the appropriate service account from the dropdown which has sufficient
privileges to create the SA.

4.Click
OK

Now
the service application is created without any issues.

As soon as I
clicked on it then I got the following ERROR MESSAGE:

The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not
available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have
been started. Please Contact your Administrator.

Resolution:

Make
sure the managed metadata service is already started.

How
to check this:

a)Central
Administration

b)Manage services on
server

c)Managed metadata
service

d)Start

Once
the service is in started mode then check the results again by clicking on the
managed metadata service application, it has to open the page without any
errors\exceptions.

If you face the same error message as mentioned above then
please execute IISRESET once and that’s it.

If
you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then
please let me know, Thank you.

15 April, 2013

Requirement
comes up to transfer the backup of one site collection from production to
development environment.

-Took
the backup of the site collection by using PowerShell command without any
issues

-As
soon as I tried restoring the backup then I faced the following error message

Error Message:

Your
backup is from a different version of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and
cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file
should be restored to a server with version '14.0.0.6134' or later.

Checkpoints:

-Compare the
development SP version with the production version and found out the following
info:

Development-
14.0.6123.5006

Production-
14.0.6120.5006

-it’s
quite obvious from the above versions that it’s not going to work L and we should be ready to hear the
answer “It seems that you need to update your development server with the
same patch which is running in production and then you can restore the backup”
/ upgrade your destination
farm to the same version of the source farm, After your farms are at the same
product version, the restore will succeed.

Resolution:

You must
be wondering as How exactly I have achieved this resolution?

Here are
the details:

-Restored Production
backup to staging application but in a separate database

-Took that database
and restored to development environment – which automatically place that DB to
the same version

The SharePoint Health Analyzer detected an error. One or more
services have started or stopped unexpectedly.

Error Message:

The following services are managed by SharePoint, but their running
state does not match what SharePoint expects: SPAdminV4. This can happen if a
service crashes or if an administrator starts or stops a service using a
non-SharePoint interface. If SharePoint-managed services do not match their
expected running state, SharePoint will be unable to correctly distribute work
to the service.

SharePoint
was unable to automatically repair this error.

To stop
or start a service managed by SharePoint, use the SharePoint service management
interface in the SharePoint Central Administration Site. If a service has
crashed, restart the service manually on the affected servers by running
"net start [service name]" from a command prompt. For more
information about this rule, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142683.

Checkpoints:

- All
services are running fine.

- All
SharePoint sites as well as web applications are running without any issues.

Reason:

Basically
it’s a clear cut indication that the one of the required service is
un-reachable.

Resolutions you can try
as there are multiple things by which we can resolve this issue:

- Check
the administration service is running or not in services console. if its
stopped/disable then please restart it.

- try to
reboot the server and check the results again.

- try
restarting the services by using command prompt

- after
the above things and if you are still facing the problem then please check the
SP logs and surely you will find theexact error which will tell you the root cause behind it.

If you have any issues/queries regarding the above mentioned
information then please let me know, Thank you